WordMagic and MeatballWiki

Brian’s paper was intellectually challenging and yet very interesting to me--it was challenging because many concepts and terms were new to me. If I put his paper in a word, it is gracious.

Brian did excellent job from describing MeatballWiki communities in details, explaining MeatballWiki as the community of practice, and how learning happens in the community.  Only suggestion I can make is if the terms had been explained or defined, it would have been much clearer.  However, on the other hand, I am guessing that Brian was practicing the MeatballWiki culture, intentional vagueness, in this paper.

MeatballWiki seems to be a left-movement on the Internet. No one has more control over anything and nothing is owned by one person.  I was always amazed the fact that Wikipedia could maintain the perfect looking format and good contents. Brian’s paper answered partly to my curiosity: Wiki is not meant to be perfect. Wiki is supposed to resemble our true communities.  It was that simple. 

There was one (only one?) interesting user profile of MeatballWiki to me. The community seems to encourage using the real names of participants.  So real names are intended to increase the accountability of the community, and it might have been actually working as the guard for the community.   I still have a question about the protection of the community from malicious people or casual visitors, considering how it is easy to detroy the contents the community has built.  Is the vagueness devised put away completely certain people?  While using real names make clear who are in the community, the (intentional) vagueness of contents seems to make an opaque wall toward non-member of MeatballWike.  MeatballWiki cultures sound profound and mysterious to me.  This less promotion and opaqueness seem to be a good protection measure for the Wiki-like communities.